'Poppins' Fresh Memories

ENLARGE

Ken Fallin

By

David Mermelstein

Dec. 11, 2013 5:09 p.m. ET

Beverly Hills, Calif.

The songwriter
Richard M. Sherman
has lately taken to calling himself "the last man standing." At age 85, he is the only person still living to have worked on the 1964
Disney
feature "Mary Poppins" directly with P.L. Travers, the author of the books that inspired the picture. The film made a movie star of
Julie Andrews,
who earned an Oscar as the title character. Mr. Sherman and his lifelong collaborator, his older brother Robert, who died last year, also won Oscars, for best song ("Chim Chim Cher-ee") and best score. Now the making of that movie is the subject of a new Disney picture, "Saving Mr. Banks," which opens in limited release on Friday.

The film, starring
Emma Thompson
as Mrs. Travers (as she was invariably called) and
Tom Hanks
as Walt Disney, tells two intersecting stories. The first details the struggle to adapt "Mary Poppins" for the screen. The second, told in flashbacks, explores Travers's troubled childhood. Mr. Sherman served as a consultant on the new film and has nothing but praise for the finished product, though he suggests that, if anything, it tones down the acrimony between the author and the Shermans, played by
Jason Schwartzman
(Richard) and
B.J. Novak
(Robert).

"Nobody knows the Sturm und Drang we went though," said a vigorous Mr. Sherman last month, sitting near his two Oscars and assorted other honors in the library of the spacious Tudor-style house he has lived in for some 40 years. "Let me make a calculated understatement: She was a very difficult woman. It was awful to be in a room where everything you said was contradicted. She made us feel terrible constantly. But Walt said: 'Don't let her get to you. Just keeping doing what you do.'"

As depicted in "Saving Mr. Banks"—and corroborated on audio tapes made at her insistence during story conferences—Travers was as determined to exclude songs or animation from any adaptation of "Mary Poppins" as Disney was to include those very things. "She didn't recognize that her character lent itself to a musical," Mr. Sherman recalled. "She had no imagination for other mediums, just the page. We added to what she had already created."

Travers wrote eight "Mary Poppins" books before she died, at age 96, in 1996, but in the 1960s there were only five—all loose collections of vignettes ill-suited, in their original form, to screen adaptation. "Everybody thinks Mrs. Travers wrote the story for the film, but it was Don DaGradi and Bob and Dick Sherman who wrote it," Mr. Sherman said. "Walt asked us to read the first book and tell him what we thought. We knew the gauntlet had been thrown. But these stories had no plot, so we created a viable storyline. And then
Bill Walsh
came in and made a great screenplay with Don."

Though Mr. Sherman and Travers never met again after the film's premiere, he learned more about his erstwhile collaborator—born Helen Goff—in the ensuing years. "Her father, Travers Goff, was a no-good lush who got fired from every bank he worked at and died when she was 8 years old," Mr. Sherman said. "She was Australian but told us she was British. And she insisted on being called Mrs. Travers even though she had never been married." These unflattering details—and others not depicted in "Saving Mr. Banks"—came to Mr. Sherman's attention about a decade ago, when he was asked to participate in a documentary that delved into Travers's private life. "I had nothing nice to say about her, except she gave us this wonderful material," Mr. Sherman recalled. "But I reluctantly agreed to be interviewed, because no one had anything nice to say about her."

Knowledge of her youthful hardships—and, perhaps, to some degree, time—has softened Mr. Sherman's feelings toward Travers. "She was strange, but I'm grateful to her," he allowed. "And I'm sympathetic, because now that I know what she came from, my heart goes out to that poor, wounded girl. Had I known back then what I know now, I wouldn't have been so affronted. I never understood why she was so crazy about these fictional characters."

Notwithstanding Travers's lifelong misgivings about the Sherman Brothers' work, millions of people have come to adore their songs—and not just those from "Mary Poppins" like "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," "Let's Go Fly a Kite" and "Feed the Birds" (Disney's personal favorite), but also the relentlessly chipper anthem "It's a Small World (After All)," the songs to the (non-Disney) film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and the pop hit "You're Sixteen." Mr. Sherman credits his sustained success to lessons learned from his father, the Tin Pan Alley songwriter Al Sherman, and to teamwork.

"It was the balance between the two of us," he said, referring to his partnership with his brother, something urged on both siblings by their father. "I would have been too mushy, and Bob would have been too hard. It was the bouncing back and forth of ideas that produced these songs. There's a lot of things that would soften as we worked together. It was Bob who said, 'A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.' That's correct, but it's not right, because you don't want to force it. So 'a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down' is better. And then we softened it even more, by adding 'in a most delightful way.' The collaboration helped shape things. And I think it made the success we had. We had 50 years of writing together."

Yet Mr. Sherman readily acknowledges that without Disney as fairy godfather—he gave the Shermans their big break, writing songs for Annette Funicello—the brothers would never have achieved the renown they did. "I adored this man," Mr. Sherman said. "He could put people together and pool their talents. He had you jumping higher than you ever dreamed you could jump—because you wanted to. When Bob and I started getting real successful, we got a lot of offers for more money, but we didn't want to leave. We loved writing for Walt. After he died, when the studio didn't need us or want us, we went out into the world. But it all started with Walt Disney. And that's why I go out of my way for this new picture, because it shows what a visionary he was."

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on film, television and classical music.

I agree, from everything I have read Travers produced little short stories, vignettes, "The children go to the Zoo today" and the whole powerful story arc of the movie came from the movie's creators. There is a line of thought - as in the movie - that the father is a central figure even though we see him only relatively briefly at intervals in the movie. However, by classical standards, it is the father that has the most impressive "character change" which would make him central in an analysis of the film story. It doesn't sound like that came from the original vignettes and short stories at all.

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